Due to advances in telecommunications technology, the ability for employees to “telecommute”—i.e., work outside their employer's office while maintaining communication with the workplace—has become more ubiquitous.
In one aspect of telecommuting, employees working from their home may conduct business by using their personal (home) telephone service, thereby using one telephone account and mixing the employees' personal and business matters. Such an arrangement, however, places the expense associated with their business calls on the employees themselves. Even if the employees are reimbursed for work-related expenses, the record-keeping associated with such reimbursement can often be cumbersome. For instance, the employees' business-related telephone service expenses need to be estimated, or the expenses of these calls must be sorted out from expenses associated with the employees' personal calls and then calculated to arrange for reimbursement. Estimated reimbursement may result in an underpayment or overpayment to employees, while an exact calculation may require an inordinate amount of processing resources.
One solution is to establish a separate telephone service account which is dedicated for the employee's business telephone calls. Such an arrangement, however, may be inconvenient and costly as an additional telephone number is assigned for each telecommuter. Thus, a given employee would not only have a workplace telephone number, a home telephone number and in many cases a cellular telephone number, but also a home office telephone number.
Another option available to the telecommuters is the implementation of call-forwarding. Call-forwarding allows for calls made to a device associated with a first telephone number to be forwarded to another device associated with a second telephone number. Although such option enables individuals to, for example, have their calls routed from their workplace telephone to their home telephone, call forwarding has various drawbacks.
First, call forwarding only applies to incoming calls. Thus, if, for example, an employee wants to make a business call from his or her home telephone, call-forwarding does not forward the charges associated with that call from the employee's home account to that of the employee's workplace.
Second, when a call is forwarded from an employee's workplace to the employee's home, typically the employee's personal home telephone system is utilized, thereby reducing the time that this device is available for personal use (as opposed to business use) by, for example, other family members in the home.
Third, a caller who is transferred to the home device can sometimes recognize that the home answering machine (rather than the workplace voicemail system) is accessed. For example, if a caller calls an employee's workplace telephone number, is transferred to the home telephone number and the called party does not answer, the caller will usually receive a response that differs from the response generated had the call not been forwarded. For example an unanswered call placed to an employee's workplace may generate a workplace voice mail message, while an unanswered call forwarded to the employee's home may generate a home answering machine message. If these messages are different (which they typically are), the call-forwarding system is not seamless and the caller knows that the phone call has been transferred from the workplace to a home—a condition that the called party may wish to avoid.
The telecommuting arrangements described thus far also suffer from drawbacks in the forms of security and quality of service. For example, because most individuals utilize the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to effectuate their telephone calls, telephone access between employees working from their home and their respective workplaces utilizes such network. Although the PSTN has proven to be quite reliable for handling telephone calls, it is not characterized as having a high quality of service (QOS) compared with, e.g., a broadband cable network.
In addition, the PSTN is not particularly secure because it has many points of access by the public to the network, rendering it an easy target for, e.g., wiretapping. Thus, telephone access over such network may raise security considerations. For example, because businesses can suffer harm if sensitive information that is shared between an employee and the employee's workplace is impermissibly accessed, it is important that such information is not intercepted (or wiretapped) by third parties.